Here Come the Black Helicopters!: UN Global Governance and the Loss of Freedom (11 page)

The Rio+20 globalists also established a ten-year plan to shift governmental procurement—in all nations and at all levels—toward goods and services that enhance their environmental goals. Noting that such purchases account for 15–25 percent of the economies of developed nations and an even larger share in poorer countries, the Rio+20 Conference sought to get all countries to alter their purchasing policies to make them greener.

But the real future thrust of environmental regulation will come against private businesses. The Rio+20 Conference lamented that only “an estimated 25 per cent of the 20,000 companies tracked by Bloomberg are reporting their environmental, social and governance footprints—but 75 per cent are not.”
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The conference urged all companies to report their environmental and social impacts. That, of course, is the first step. Armed with this disclosure, the global/environmentalists will seek to reward and punish companies based on their environmental and social policies.

Rio called for helping “pension funds to invest in companies with a long-term perspective of profits through sustainability reporting while assisting governments in measuring the contribution of multi-nationals towards national sustainability goals.”
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In other words, if you pay off the third world, the UNEP will make sure you get contracts, investments, and regulatory support. If not, watch out!

As part of their plan for reshaping our global economy, the Rio+20 Conference called for the replacement of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the central measurement of national wealth. Condemning the “narrowness” of GDP as a measurement of economies, it called for a new measurement that would “encourage governments to push forward on requiring companies to report their environmental, social, and governance footprints.”
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Once private companies measure the extent to which their operations drain the world’s wealth through adverse economic or social policies, the UN wants to recalculate the GDP of each country to subtract the negative consequences of its growth.

The vector of this new push is easy to recognize. It would have each company admit and quantify how much it has subtracted from world and national wealth by extracting minerals, endangering the environment, laying off workers, closing plants, etc. By measuring this “environmental and social damage,” the UN lays the predicate for fining or taxing or otherwise regulating companies and nations for their damaging policies and programs.

The participants at the Rio+20 were not happy with the outcome despite its evident progress toward global governance. They want mandatory and binding global governance to control all issues related to the global economy, environmental policies, third world development, and the transfer of wealth to poor nations. Anything less is inadequate. But they are patient and keep coming back for more bites at the apple.

The
New York Times
reported sadly that the Rio+20 conference agreed on “so few specifics, so few targets, so few tangible decisions . . . that some participants were derisively calling it ‘Rio Minus 20.’ ”
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Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace, was particularly dissatisfied, calling the Rio+20 Conference “a failure of epic proportions.”
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The radical greens all piled on. Lasse Gustavsson, executive director for conservation at the World Wildlife Fund, said that “sophisticated UN diplomacy has given us nothing more than more poverty, more conflict and more environmental destruction.”
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The
Times
noted that “the final statement from Rio . . . is 283 paragraphs of kumbaya that ‘affirm,’ ‘recognize,’ ‘underscore,’ ‘urge’ and ‘acknowledge’ seemingly every green initiative and environmental problem from water crises and creeping deserts to climate change and overfishing. Women’s rights, indigenous peoples, children, mining, tourism, trade unions and the elderly also get shout-outs in the document. The word ‘reaffirm’ is used 60 times.”
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The German daily newspaper
Süddeutsche Zeitung
editorialized:

To be sure, all of the great questions facing humanity make an appearance in the document, but without any attempt at a binding agreement. The Rio+20 conference, which really should have provided a new spark, has instead shined the spotlight on global timidity. Postpone, consider, examine: Even the conference motto—“The Future We Want”—sounds like an insult. If this is the future we want, then good night.

If all countries are satisfied with the lowest common denominator, if they no longer want to discuss what needs to be discussed . . . then the dikes are open. There is no need any more for a conference of 50,000 attendees. Resolutions that are so wishy-washy can be interpreted by every member state as they wish. No one needs Rio.
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Doubtless, the greens would have been much happier if, instead of the words “affirm,” “recognize,” “underscore,” “urge,” and “acknowledge,” the Rio final document included more robust prose like “require,” “regulate,” “mandatory,” and “dictated.” But, there’s always tomorrow.

But the conference did provide a clear indication of where the environmentalists and globalists are heading. The
Washington Post
reports that “some of the biggest issues activists wanted to see in the document that didn’t make it in included a call to end subsidies for fossil fuels, language underscoring the reproductive rights of women, and some words on how nations might mutually agree to protect the high seas, areas that fall outside any national jurisdictions.”
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The Post quotes Greenpeace’s Kumi Naidoo as saying: “[W]e saw anything of value in the early text getting removed one by one. What is left is the clear sense that the future we want is not one our leaders can actually deliver. We now need to turn the anger people around the world are feeling into creative, thoughtful and meaningful action.”
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Rio may not have given the globalists all they wanted, but they received a lot. And we will give them more and more and more unless we realize that their real goal is the forcible transfer of our wealth to them and the surrender of our national sovereignty to a world body.

PART SIX

UN SUPREMACY OVER OUR COURTS

Not content with grabbing global jurisdiction of the oceans and attempting to control the Internet, the globalists at the United Nations are determined to get the United States to knuckle under to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, creating a court superior to our own US Supreme Court.

The International Criminal Court, organized by the United Nations, is battling to gain worldwide acceptance. Already 120 countries have signed on to the court and thirty-two others have signed the treaty recognizing its jurisdiction, but have not yet ratified it.

But until the court can claim jurisdiction over the United States, Russia, and China, it cannot hold sway over the world. None of the big three have signed on.

But President Obama and Secretary Clinton have begun to move in that direction and will likely move further in a second term—should Obama win one—or even in the lame-duck part of this term. (Even if the Senate does not ratify this treaty, under the Vienna Convention—see page 30—we must abide by it until we explicitly renounce it.)

President Bill Clinton did actually sign the treaty in 2000, but he did not submit it to the Senate for ratification because he had problems with some of its provisions. President George W. Bush renounced the treaty and, now, Obama is cozying up to it again.

State Department legal counselor Harold Koh said, “After 12 years, I think we have reset the default on the US relationship with the Court from hostility to positive engagement. In this case, principled engagement worked to protect our interest, to improve the outcome, and to bring us renewed international goodwill.”
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But that “international goodwill” comes with quite a price!

NO WAR WITHOUT UN APPROVAL

The International Criminal Court is a typical UN bait-and-switch routine. Nominally established to bring dictator/war criminals to justice, its real purpose is to hamstring the US military and force it to abide by UN Security Council rule and regulation. The globalists are using the reasonable desire to get an international court to catch war criminals to restrict the use of military force without the approval of the Security Council—that is to say, without Russian and Chinese approval.

The Treaty of Rome creates a new international crime of “aggression,” which means “the use of armed force by one State against another State without the justification of self-defense or authorization by the [UN] Security Council.”
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Under the terms of the court’s operation, US presidents who went to war without council approval are liable to arrest, prosecution, and punishment by the International Criminal Court after they leave office.

Former president George W. Bush was planning a trip to Switzerland, where he was to be the keynote speaker at a Jewish charity gala. But Reuters reported that “pressure [was] building on the Swiss government to arrest him . . . if he entered the country,” since Switzerland is a signatory to the ICC. On December 2, 2011, Amnesty International called for Bush’s arrest while he was touring East Africa. Bush canceled his trip to Switzerland “due to the risk of legal action against him for alleged torture.” He went to East Africa without incident.
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American negotiators succeeded in getting an amendment to the Rome treaty passed that permitted signatories to opt out of the provisions governing the crime of aggression, but it is worth noting that even though the US is not a signatory to the treaty, Bush was still in jeopardy if he had set foot on Swiss territory.

In any event, the ICC’s powers are very elastic. The Rome Treaty says that the court “shall satisfy itself that it has jurisdiction in any case brought before it.”
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As with many of the UN treaties, the carefully crafted protections and codicils on which our diplomats insist can be swept aside by the body the treaty creates in years ahead without any need to go back to the signatories for approval.

OBAMA’S READY TO SIGN

The evidence that Obama is planning to move toward membership in the ICC is overwhelming. While he has neither signed the treaty yet nor submitted it for Senate ratification, US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues Stephen Rapp told the media “our government has now made the decision that Americans will return to engagement at the ICC.” The US participated as an observer at the ICC annual meeting in 2010, the first time we sent a delegation to such a meeting.
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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the US would end its “hostility” to the ICC. Susan Rice, US ambassador to the UN, expressed support for the ICC investigations in the Sudan.

President George W. Bush, on the other hand, was very negative on the ICC and even renounced American cooperation with it, stating that the United States has no legal obligations arising from its signature on the Rome Treaty. He was particularly worried that the ICC might prosecute American soldiers deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan, or other countries and insisted on concluding bilateral agreements with more than one hundred nations hosting our troops, specifying that they would not hand over our personnel to the court for trial.

Now President Obama has removed the sanctions that governed those bilateral agreements, and so has signaled our willingness to cooperate with the court.

$100 MILLION, 700 STAFF, AND ONE INDICTMENT

The ICC does a terrible job of the task for which it was nominally created: the prosecution of human rights violators. In ten years of operation, it has accumulated a staff of seven hundred and spends an annual budget of $100 million. It has, according to the
Wall Street Journal
, “so far completed precisely one trial—that of Thomas Lubanga, a commander in the civil war in Congo. It took three years and ended with a conviction on March 14, 1012. The appeals have not begun. A few other trials are ongoing or set to begin. Even by the low standards of international tribunals, this performance should raise an eyebrow.”
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While 120 countries have signed on to the ICC, few of the really bad actors have done so. The
Journal
reports that the court’s membership “includes few authoritarian countries that employ repression or conduct military operations. Mostly democracies with some semblance of rule of law have joined.”
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Since the ICC cannot intervene unless a nation is a signatory to the treaty, it doesn’t get much business.

But the possible implications of this court are terrifying. It would have the right, if we signed on, to prosecute Americans for crimes committed on American soil. If a person had already been acquitted by our own courts, it could indict and try him anew without any restrictions on double jeopardy.

The court could even overrule decisions of our own Supreme Court if we become a party to its jurisdiction.

And the ICC has none of our constitutional protections. It has no trial by jury, no right to a speedy trial, no separation of prosecutorial and judicial functions (the judge and the prosecutor are the same person). It has no protections against search and seizure and does not follow American jurisprudence.

Some people have cited the court’s inability to go after war criminals as a reason to strengthen its jurisdiction, but Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, drew the opposite conclusion, writing in the
Journal
, “Now . . . it is clear that the ICC will serve no country’s interests, let alone international justice. . . . It is too weak to deter atrocities, end impunity, or keep the peace, but it is strong enough to serve as an irritant in international relations.”
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But the globalists will continue to press for ICC jurisdiction, always remembering that the court is the judge of its own powers. While their initial sales pitch for the court sounds impressive—the prosecution of war criminals—it really is a heavily disguised attempt to bring the United States and our military under the jurisdiction of a global court. If the Law of the Sea Treaty is a threat to our naval dominance, the ICC is poised to restrict our military power.

We must be vigilant on this issue and move quickly to defeat it should the Obama administration move to resurrect the court and deepen American participation.